Article Details

Changing Shape of Neighborhood Social Cohesion Under the Impact of Large scale High- Rise Housing Development, A Case of Jaipur, Rajasthan | Original Article

Manjari Rai*, in Journal of Advances and Scholarly Researches in Allied Education | Multidisciplinary Academic Research

ABSTRACT:

Building design and space morphology strongly impact the life and structure of a community . Urban form is an outcome of human activity and thus it has a strong impact on social interaction, which is assumed to be one of the major design elements in urban planning. Apart from providing a living space for the inhabitants, housing should also offer spaces for community life to develop and nurture . Spatial organization in a residential neighbourhood is thus a strong indicator of a region and its varied social setups. In present times, majorly after 1990”s, rapid urbanization and borrowed western ideas gave birth to prototypical high rise developments as part of mass housing. Aim behind such growth was to fulfil the over growing need of housing in urban areas. Vernacular ideas have been replaced by modernist spaces that eventually lead to a development which had no connection with the environment and the people around. Designers and planners, very conveniently, had ignored the significance of human scale and the people who are the actual end users. Factory made neighbourhood and residential colonies were planned that lack identity and interaction centric spatial organization. Gradually, traditional residential areas having intense connection with man and surrounding and possess strong connections have been replaced by fragmented and introvert setups. Building such neighbourhoods is a challenge in present times. No solution can be considered perfect in such a situation. This paper thus attempts to analyse the connection between spatial layout and urban form with social relations towards forming a socially cohesive society. It tries to establish a relationship between sociocultural aspects of a society and spatial geometry in terms of morphology and design process. With the help of a comparative study done through field surveys from certain selected neighbourhoods of Walled city of Jaipur and a newly formed residential neighbourhood of southern Jaipur, this study is an attempt to document and comprehend a relationship between the geometry of built environment with human behaviour w.r.t the spaces designed for them.